Tag Archives: haunted house

The doorway
has become dissociative. Things may
enter or leave without being taken notice
of in the slightest.
They will come to find the piano shuddering,
it’s teeth chattering and it’s body oddly
formed into a fetal position all huddled up
in a cocoon of drunken catharsis.
The paintings, they have become severely
bipolar and are beginning to melt
like naked candles fused to the window
looking outside and offering the false perception
that it is safe to wander between these walls. The Walter Anderson’s and the Dali’s,
the Van Gogh’s and the junkyard salvages; they
no longer know which expressions
are proper for making love, greeting strangers,
or for killing with their bare hands. And
the skeletons that hang from the
ceiling, they are entirely hysterical. They sing
long echoing lullaby’s and longer goodbyes
through a bass amp buried below them
and are often interrupted by laughter at
their small plights – their sexual organs
turning to dust and the chaffing of the
string that tethers them to this place.
Somewhere here there is a bed
plagued with anxiety and night terrors.
And on it a man with a guitar plays
a song about suicide
with a beer bottle as a pick. And any tears
in this moment, spilling even down to the
tattoos that beg you to read their ideals,
they are the purest of things; the least
haunted by disease or disorder.

I am the cracked walls and leaky ceiling.
I am the vengeful specter.
I am everything here.

Visitors are so fond of saying what resonates in this domain
is either ghostly or sibylline.
But, if you were to know the history
of this ancient vessel,
you would know it is only sublimely human
in all its love
and its capacity for great suffering.